The Senecan Aesthetic

The Senecan Aesthetic PDF Author: Helen Slaney
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198736762
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description
The Senecan Aesthetic surveys the multifarious ways in which Senecan tragedy has been staged, from the Renaissance up to the present day, and restores Seneca to a canonical position among the playwrights of antiquity, recognizing him as one of the most important, most revered, and most reviled.

The Senecan Aesthetic

The Senecan Aesthetic PDF Author: Helen Slaney
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198736762
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description
The Senecan Aesthetic surveys the multifarious ways in which Senecan tragedy has been staged, from the Renaissance up to the present day, and restores Seneca to a canonical position among the playwrights of antiquity, recognizing him as one of the most important, most revered, and most reviled.

Seneca's Tragedies and the Aesthetics of Pantomime

Seneca's Tragedies and the Aesthetics of Pantomime PDF Author: Alessandra Zanobi
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1472506081
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Pantomime was arguably the most popular dramatic genre during the Roman Empire, but has been relatively neglected by literary critics. Seneca's Tragedies and the Aesthetics of Pantomime adds to our understanding of Seneca's tragic art by demonstrating that elements which have long puzzled scholars can be attributed to the influence of pantomime. The work argues that certain formal features which depart from the conventions of fifth-century Attic drama can be explained by the influence of, and interaction with, this more popular genre. The work includes a detailed and systematic analysis of the specific pantomime-inspired features of Seneca's tragedies: the loose dramatic structure, the presence of “running commentaries” (minute descriptions of characters undergoing emotional strains or performing specific actions), of monologues of self-analysis, and of narrative set-pieces. Relevant to the culture of Roman imperial culture more generally, Seneca's Tragedies and the Aesthetics of Pantomime includes an outline of the general features of pantomime as a genre. The work shows that the influence of sub-literary-genres such as pantomime and mime, the sister art of pantomime, can be traced in several Roman writers whose literary production was antecedent or contemporary with Seneca's. Furthermore, the work sheds light on the interaction between sub-literary genres of a performative nature such as mime and pantomime and more literary ones, an aspect of Latin culture which previous scholarship has tended to overlook. Seneca's Tragedies and the Aesthetics of Pantomime provides an original contribution to the understanding of the impact of pantomime on Roman literary culture and of controversial and little-understood features of Senecan tragedies.

Seneca's Characters

Seneca's Characters PDF Author: Erica M. Bexley
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108801773
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 399

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Book Description
Seneca's Characters addresses one of the most enduring and least theorised elements of literature: fictional character and its relationship to actual, human selfhood. Where does the boundary between character and person lie? While the characters we encounter in texts are obviously not 'real' people, they still possess person-like qualities that stimulate our attention and engagement. How is this relationship formulated in contexts of theatrical performance, where characters are set in motion by actual people, actual bodies and voices? This book addresses such questions by focusing on issues of coherence, imitation, appearance and autonomous action. It argues for the plays' sophisticated treatment of character, their acknowledgement of its purely fictional ontology alongside deep – and often dark – appreciation of its quasi-human qualities. Seneca's Characters offers a fresh perspective on the playwright's powerful tragic aesthetics that will stimulate scholars and students alike.

Seneca's Medea and Republican Spain

Seneca's Medea and Republican Spain PDF Author: Oliver Baldwin
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1855663562
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
Based on extensive archival research and containing rare and previously unpublished photos, this book provides the most detailed reconstruction ever of one of the most important events in Spanish theatrical history.Winner of the 2019-20 AHGBI-Spanish Embassy Publication Prize On 18 June 1933, one of the most important events in Spanish theatrical history took place before an audience of 3,000 spectators in the ruins of the Roman Theatre in Mérida. Translated into Spanish by philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, staged by the renowned Xirgu-Borràs Company and funded by the government, the performance of Seneca''s Medea was a triumph of republican culture and widely hailed for its new dramatic and scenic languages. This book provides the most detailed reconstruction of this pivotal production to date, setting it in context and analysing its origin and legacy. Early twentieth-century intellectuals considered Seneca, ''the philosopher from Córdoba'', the epitome of Spanishness and the first in an illustrious line of playwrights stretching from Spain''s Roman Antiquity to its Silver Age. His play was seen as the ideal vehicle to showcase the Second Spanish Republic''s cultural, social and educational agenda but provoked a furious backlash from opponents to the government''s progressive programme. The book shows how the performance became a cultural ritual which stood at the centre of critical discussions on national identity, politics, secularism, women''s rights and new European aesthetics of theatre-making. Based on extensive archival research and containing rare and previously unpublished photos, it will be of interest to theatre historians, scholars of Classical Reception and historians of the Second Spanish Republic.aywrights stretching from Spain''s Roman Antiquity to its Silver Age. His play was seen as the ideal vehicle to showcase the Second Spanish Republic''s cultural, social and educational agenda but provoked a furious backlash from opponents to the government''s progressive programme. The book shows how the performance became a cultural ritual which stood at the centre of critical discussions on national identity, politics, secularism, women''s rights and new European aesthetics of theatre-making. Based on extensive archival research and containing rare and previously unpublished photos, it will be of interest to theatre historians, scholars of Classical Reception and historians of the Second Spanish Republic.aywrights stretching from Spain''s Roman Antiquity to its Silver Age. His play was seen as the ideal vehicle to showcase the Second Spanish Republic''s cultural, social and educational agenda but provoked a furious backlash from opponents to the government''s progressive programme. The book shows how the performance became a cultural ritual which stood at the centre of critical discussions on national identity, politics, secularism, women''s rights and new European aesthetics of theatre-making. Based on extensive archival research and containing rare and previously unpublished photos, it will be of interest to theatre historians, scholars of Classical Reception and historians of the Second Spanish Republic.aywrights stretching from Spain''s Roman Antiquity to its Silver Age. His play was seen as the ideal vehicle to showcase the Second Spanish Republic''s cultural, social and educational agenda but provoked a furious backlash from opponents to the government''s progressive programme. The book shows how the performance became a cultural ritual which stood at the centre of critical discussions on national identity, politics, secularism, women''s rights and new European aesthetics of theatre-making. Based on extensive archival research and containing rare and previously unpublished photos, it will be of interest to theatre historians, scholars of Classical Reception and historians of the Second Spanish Republic.ce became a cultural ritual which stood at the centre of critical discussions on national identity, politics, secularism, women''s rights and new European aesthetics of theatre-making. Based on extensive archival research and containing rare and previously unpublished photos, it will be of interest to theatre historians, scholars of Classical Reception and historians of the Second Spanish Republic.

Seneca Hercules

Seneca Hercules PDF Author: A. J. Boyle
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198856946
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 806

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Book Description
Hercules is a tragedy of great theatrical, poetic, and cultural value. Written probably at the intersection of the principates of Claudius and Nero, it addresses central issues of early imperial Rome, even as it speaks profoundly to our times. Among its concerns are violence and madness; imperatives of family and self; Rome, identity and place; the nature of virtue; the longing for immortality; the theatre of rage; and the empire of death. The play is dramatically innovative, spectacular, and arresting: from its fiery, monumental god-prologue (the only one in Senecan tragedy), through meditative soliloquies, impassioned speeches, trenchant dialogue, a failed wooing scene with an impressive after-life in Tudor drama, a stunning entrance for Hercules and his captured hellhound, Theseus' ecphrastic narrative of the hero's infernal 'labour', to a familicidal madness scene and an emotionally turbulent, non-violent finale, in which the instinct for self-punitive suicide is thwarted by the claims of kinship and the acceptance of intolerable suffering. The whole is bound together by some of Seneca's most affective choral lyrics, as intellectually engaging as they are emotionally potent. Hercules is A. J. Boyle's sixth, full-scale edition for OUP of a play by or attributed to Seneca. It offers a comprehensive introduction, newly edited Latin text, English verse translation designed for both performance and academic study, and a detailed exegetic, analytic, and interpretative commentary. The aim has been to elucidate the text dramatically as well as philologically, and to locate the play firmly in its contemporary historical and theatrical context and the ensuing literary and dramatic tradition. As such, its substantial influence on European drama from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries is given emphasis throughout; this and the accessibility of the commentary to Latinless readers make the edition particularly useful to scholars and students not only of classics, but also of comparative literature and drama, and to anyone interested in the cultural dynamics of literary reception and the interplay between theatre and history.

Seneca

Seneca PDF Author: Lucius Annaeus Seneca
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801849329
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
Plays and translators: Octavia, Kelly Cherry * Hercules Oetaeus, Stephen Sandy * Oedipus, Rachel Hadas * The Phoenician Women, David Slavitt * Hercules Furens, Dana Gioia. Are there no limits to human cruelty? Is there any divine justice? Do the gods even matter if they do not occupy themselves with rewarding virtue and punishing wickedness? Seneca's plays might be dismissed as bombastic and extravagant answers to such questions—if so much of human history were not "Senecan" in its absurdity, melodrama, and terror. Here is an honest artist confronting the irrationality and cruelty of his world—the Rome of Caligula, Claudius, and Nero—and his art reflects the stress of the encounter. The surprise, perhaps, is that Seneca's world is so like our own.

In Shakespeare's Shadow

In Shakespeare's Shadow PDF Author: Michael Blanding
Publisher: Hachette Books
ISBN: 0316493287
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 548

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Book Description
The true story of a self-taught sleuth's quest to prove his eye-opening theory about the source of the world's most famous plays, taking readers inside the vibrant era of Elizabethan England as well as the contemporary scene of Shakespeare scholars and obsessives. What if Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare . . . but someone else wrote him first? Acclaimed author of The Map Thief, Michael Blanding presents the twinning narratives of renegade scholar Dennis McCarthy and Elizabethan courtier Sir Thomas North. Unlike those who believe someone else secretly wrote Shakespeare, McCarthy argues that Shakespeare wrote the plays, but he adapted them from source plays written by North decades before. In Shakespeare's Shadow alternates between the enigmatic life of North, the intrigues of the Tudor court, the rivalries of English Renaissance theater, and academic outsider McCarthy's attempts to air his provocative ideas in the clubby world of Shakespearean scholarship. Through it all, Blanding employs his keen journalistic eye to craft a captivating drama, upending our understanding of the beloved playwright and his "singular genius." Winner of the 2021 International Book Award in Narrative Non-Fiction

Titus Andronicus: The State of Play

Titus Andronicus: The State of Play PDF Author: Farah Karim Cooper
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350027405
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Shakespeare's and Peele's Titus Andronicus has had a theatrical and a critical revival in the last fifteen years; the critical revival was perhaps prompted by Jonathan Bate's Arden edition of the play and its revision of the traditional critical account that it is an immature work and overly sensationalistic with its emphasis on non-essential violence. Recent debates and approaches have drawn closer attention to the play's classicism; re-defined its genre (for example the revised edition of the New Dramatic Sources will re-classify the play as one of Shakespeare's Roman plays); re-considered the nature of violent spectacle, family relations and kinship, political alliance, race and miscegenation. This study will explore how the revitalized critical responses to early modern and contemporary performance histories has had a significant impact upon the wider reception of this play.

Understanding Latin Literature

Understanding Latin Literature PDF Author: Susanna Morton Braund
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131724026X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
Understanding Latin Literature is a highly accessible, user-friendly work that provides a fresh and illuminating introduction to the most important aspects of Latin prose and poetry. This second edition is heavily revised to reflect recent developments in scholarship, especially in the area of the later reception and reverberations of Latin literature. Chapters are dedicated to Latin writers such as Virgil and Livy and explore how literature related to Roman identity and society. Readers are stimulated and inspired to do their own further reading through engagement with a wide selection of translated extracts and through understanding the different ways in which they can be approached. Central throughout is the theme of the fundamental connections between Latin literature and issues of elite Roman culture. The versatile and accessible structure of Understanding Latin Literature makes it suitable for both individual and class use.

Interdisciplinary Essays on Cannibalism

Interdisciplinary Essays on Cannibalism PDF Author: Giulia Champion
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000373843
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
Interdisciplinary Essays on Cannibalism: Bites Here and There brings together a range of works exploring the evolution of cannibalism, literally and metaphorically, diachronically and across disciplines. This edited collection aims to promote a conversation on the evolution and the different uses of the tropes and figures of cannibalism, in order to understand and deconstruct the fascination with anthropophagy, its continued afterlife and its relation to different disciplines and spaces of discourse. In order to do so, the contributing authors shed a new light not only on the concept, but also propose to explore cannibalism through new optics and theories. Spanning 15 chapters, the collection explores cannibalism across disciplines and fields from Antiquity to contemporary speculative fiction, considering history, anthropology, visual and film studies, philosophy, feminist theories, psychoanalysis and museum practices. This collection of thoughtful and thought-provoking scholarly contributions suggests the importance of cannibalism in understanding human history and social relations.